You're not thinking 4th dimensionally!

Time travel has always been an interesting topic for me. Unfortunately, most of the time travel games I've played tend to fall flat, because time travel is hard. With advances in board game technology, and in general creativity of designers, I feel like we're getting closer to one of the holy grails of game design - a fun, fluid game about time travel.

As yet I have not come up with anything that really worked well with respect to a time travel themed game design. However, last night I might have stumbled onto an idea that could work... at this point it's just an idea, and it would probably only work for 2 players, but here's a potential way to do a sort of time duel card game:

Suppose each player has a set of cards, numbered 1 through N, where N is the number of total rounds there will be in the game. These numbers would correspond to specific times (T=1, T=2, etc) and would represent some action a player would take at that time interval. You'd have several cards for each interval in your set, but you can't play more than 1 card of each time interval - because you can only do one thing at a time!

Each round, each player would simultaneously choose one card to play face down, simultaneously revealing them. You would not need to play the cards in any particular order - the only restriction is that you cannot play a card if you've already played a card at that time interval. Then, after reviewing your opponent's card, you move on to the next round and select another card to play.

The idea here being that you can see your opponent is going to do a specific thing at time T=4, so you can decide to take an action at time T=3 which makes their T=4 action weak or useless. In other words, you see that your opponent is going to grab a tool at time T=4, so you go back in time to T=3 and grab it first! Or something like that.

Once all N rounds have been played, players would put their cards in numerical order and resolve them to determine the result of the game.

I would think that strategically, you could play lower numbered cards early, making yourself less susceptible to an opponent's monkeying with your plans, however you also give up the ability to 'undercut' your opponent's actions as well. On the other hand, if you play higher numbers first, you reserve the ability to undercut an opponent, but at the same time you open yourself up to possible sabotage from your opponent.

I'm not sure if that could be  made interesting, but it sounds like it might work. I would think players would need an open goal from the outset, and possibly a secret goal as well in order to give them reasons to choose one action over another, especially in the early game.

Anyway, that's just an idea - I wanted to get it down here so that I don't forget.

Money Auction in Liar's Dice game

Talking about this game idea with Andy Van Zandt, here's a way that might be more elegant than adding money to the game...

After each round of Bluff auctions, the winner of each is determined and, on the spot, they may choose to either:
(a) Keep the item for their display
(b) Sell the item to the game in exchange for 1 color die
(c) Offer the item for open trade to an opponent.

Upon seeing who's won an item, players can freely offer any number of their dice or artifacts in exchange for the artifact just won by the player. The player is welcome to entertain any such offer, or ignore them in favor of keeping the item for themselves or discarding it from the game and collecting an extra color die.

There might need to be a rule that the player cannot accept an item they cannot display. there will be 5 different colors of items, and players will each be able to display only 3 of them. Then again, I think that restriction might be a dumb one. I had planned on making different types of items: Weapons, Tools, Art, etc. and a player could make a Green (Mayan, for example) exhibit, or a Weapons exhibit containing a Mayan weapon, a Roman weapon, and an American weapon. That seems better, and would obviate the need for a restriction on what you can accept in trade.

This might be a more elegant way of adding a supplemental auction to the game without adding money to the game. I'll keep it in mind!

I also need a name for this game. I like the subtitle Museum of Lost History, but I need a catchy name with a hook for the actual title. Perhaps Chrono Gallery: Museum of Lost Time?

Feel free to chime in in the comments with a better title!

Time travel... revisited (ha ha)

I watched a LOT of Dr Who over the holiday season - I haven't ever really seen that show before. And that's kind of weird because I love a good Time Travel story. I never saw the old ones, and only now have watched the most recent couple of seasons, but I was impressed by how much planning ahead they seemed to do in the writing. They put things in 1 show deliberately which would be a part of a later show, and you wouldn't even notice until you saw the later show. They also did a good job avoiding paradoxes.

Yesterday I was thinking that it would be fun to do a board game based on Dr Who, or a time travel sort of game in general. I've put some thought into this in the past, but haven't progressed on any of it lately. Here's some of the stuff I thought of yesterday, followed by some thoughts on reviving one of my time travel themed games from before:

One thing that's amusing about Dr Who is that while he's a Time Lord, and has a fancy spaceship that can travel through time, he often doesn't end up where he was planning on going. Also, he keeps saying something about not being able to travel back and forth within his own time line (never mind that he seems to do it anyway). Then there's this thing called a Vortex Manipulator, which allows a person to sort of teleport through space and time as well, but the Doctor knocks it as being a cheap or tacky way to travel through time. Imagine a board, at the center is a sort of spinner - maybe a disc, with a TARDIS depicted on one side (at an oblique angle such that it comes to a point, and can be used as a pointer). Surrounding this disc, radiating outward, are several paths, each representing a different location in space, each 'location' path having some number of spaces on it leading away from the TARDIS. Each of these spaces represents a different time. So you have maybe London on one path, and the spaces along that path correspond to (1) ancient history, (2) somewhat recent history (Winston Churchill's era maybe), (3) something contemporary (2010), and (4) some time in the future. I like the idea of sometimes when travelling through space and time in the TARDIS, a player simply spins the spinner and randomly determines where he ends up. If the spinner also had a mechanism for randomly determining which point in time the TARDIS lands, that would be cool.

These locations need to have the various different times associated, because events would occur in those locations, and they'd have an overall chronological order. Taking some liberties, I think it would be cool if the TARDIS can basically move you from one location in space time to another, different one, and a Vortex Manipulator only moved you through time at the same location.

One of the main thoughts about time travel that came into my mind was this - how do you represent when one character in a time travel story knows what will happen in the future of the other characters? Like in Dr Who, when they keep bumping into River Song, another time traveler who comes from the Doctor's future, and often knows what will happen later on in the Doctor's time line. Suppose there's a small deck of cards for each location depicting events that may occur there. These events would be numbered so they could be put in relative chronological order, but not all of them would come up in a given game - there would be more than enough. The event cards would be shuffled and some removed, and when needed they could be drawn and placed in their appropriate relative order. To represent a player knowing what event will happen in the future, that player could simply draw an event card early, thereby knowing one of the things that will occur in the future (or the past I guess, depending on your point of view).

Each of these events could have some sort of challenge or condition that must be met in order to resolve or move past it. As an example, in the Dr Who Episode The Big Bang, the Doctor has been imprisoned in The Pandorica. A future Doctor pops in via Vortex Manipulator and tells Rory to get him out of the Pandorica and put the mortally wounded Amy Pond in it, and then disappears. Then he pops back in and says "you'll need this" and hands Rory his Sonic Screwdriver. Later, you see the other side of this exchange, when the Doctor pops back in time to tell that to Rory, then realizes he needs his screwdriver back, so he pops back again and tells Rory to leave the screwdriver in Amy's jacket. Then, in the 'present', he reaches into Amy's pocket and retrieves his screwdriver. Similarly, a player might need a tool in order to pass a challenge or deal with an event card. Maybe they have a Sonic Screwdriver card, but don't actually have the screwdriver on them (another player does). Maybe they can play the card to the location they're using it, and put a Paradox counter on it, representing that they managed to get ahold of the screwdriver somehow. Then they use it and move on. Before the end of the game though, all Paradox counters must be removed - meaning someone later must go to that location on or before the screwdriver was needed and leave it there.

I was thinking perhaps a cooperative game is the way to go, with some soft timer - some amount of time in which the players need to save the world (from Dalek attack, or from total event collapse, or whatever). Before that timer runs out, the players will have had to satisfy the win conditions AND removed all Paradox counters from the board. Though it might be hard to track if, say, the Doctor uses the screwdriver at time t=5, and Rory uses the screwdriver at time t=3, and to facilitate that, River at time t=6 meets up with the Doctor at time t=2, takes the screwdriver, and delivers it to Rory... that actually creates a paradox because now the Doctor doesn't have the screwdriver when time t=5 rolls around!

Anyway, it's amusing to think about, and I like thinking about time travel. it reminded me that I have a couple game ideas involving time travel on the back burner.One of them I like a lot, involving the "bluff auction" - multiple simultaneous games of Liar's Dice as a mechanism to drive a bigger game:

With the advent of Time Travel, museum curators have procured prototype time machines, and will use them to go back in time and "save" precious cultural artifacts that - until now - have been lost to history (damaged, destroyed, or lost forever). But it's very important not to cause a paradox, or let people know the item still exists - so only the player who arrives closest to the time the item is thought to have disappeared will be able to take it!

Thematically though it's a bit strange that a player couldn't simply go back in time 1 hour further than the other guy and swipe the artifact out from under the player who wins the bid. Perhaps instead of each museum getting a time machine, there could be a sort of governing body (the Worldwide Historic Authority on Time?) which controls the machine and attempts to ensure that people don't muck up history with their time travel antics. This body has decided to allow the museum curators to display these long lost artifacts, but in an attempt to make sure history is impacted as little as possible, they will only allow the player who's research indicates the latest possible opportunity to get the artifact to go back in time and fetch it - or perhaps they send their own time agents. Whatever. In any case, the WHAT rewards the player who does the 'best' research to display the artifact in their museum.


This might tie up some silly plot holes in the story (not all of them, I'm sure), and still fit the theme well. It might be easier to say that players want to go back as far as possible, but after the item was created in order to take it, but thematically, doing so would erase all trace of importance from the object, and nobody would care to come see it!


Perhaps there's a way to make an item's value variable, based on how long it is around before it's collected by a time traveler... so there's an incentive not to go back any further than you need to - but I think that's a whole different game and wouldn't work well with the Liar's Dice auction.


... And with that garbled mess above, I conclude this post about time travel. I fully expect following everything in this post will be appropriately confusing considering the subject matter! :)

Time Rewind - first draft test

I tried a version of the Time Rewind game idea with Steve last night, each of us playing 2 characters to simulate a 4 player game. Honestly, while it had some potential, I didn't like it as much as I thought I would.

I approximated the cards and mechanisms in the game using a deck of cards. Here's how we played:

Setup:
Take the 5-10s and Ks of a standard deck, shuffle them, and lay them out face down in a 7 row pyramid/trellis pattern. Flip up the first card (tip of pyramid) and place the 4 player pawns on it. Take the 4 As, 3 Qs, and 1 other card from the deck and shuffle those, laying them out as the 8th and final row. Q represents a victory condition (get to a Q card and then 'pass the challenge' there). As and the other card are failed attempts to fix the Instability.

Shuffle another deck of cards - these are the cards players will draw. On these cards only the suit matters, not the rank.

Each turn went like this:

1. Collect resources: reveal the top 4 cards from the deck. Players distribute 1 card to each player any way they like. In addition, move the Instability marker 1 space along the track for each Heart revealed this way. This serves as a semi-random timer for when rewinds happen (when the end of the track is reached, a rewind happens).

2. Move - any player who wants to move their pawn can do so, to either of the 2 spaces in the next row adjacent to their current position.

The trellis represents a tree of binary decisions, so you can only navigate it forward. When a Rewind occurs, it sends players back in time (to the left on the trellis), giving them the opportunity to make different choices this time, however you can only make different choices for the decision points that got rewound, anything that's "still in the past" is set and cannot be changed (until a later Rewind takes you back beyond that).

3. Draw - anyone who didn't move can opt to draw 1 card from the deck. If it's a heart, advance the Instability marker.

4. Peek - anyone who didn't move and didn't draw can peek at upcoming cards... choose a row, and look at all face down cards in that row which you can still possibly get to. Shuffle those cards and return them face down. this gives you some information as to whether you're on the right track or not, and is probably most useful for looking at the last row from a few rows back to see if there's a Q there.

5. Challenge - reveal any face down cards people had moved to, and undergo the challenge there. In this version the challenge was simply this: Play a number of cards equal to the number on the card (so 5-10) plus 1/2/3/... for being in the 2nd/3rd/4th/... row, with cards matching suit counting double. A K card, if passed, is collected as an Item, and in this case the item simply gave a +3 to all challenges matching that suit (i.e. the K of Spades helps you win further Spade challenges). If you fail the challenge, the Instability marker is moved up once. Perhaps this should have been variable depending on how much you fail by, to encourage playing cards even if failing.

We also moved the instability marker one space if the card turned up was a Heart.

So a challenge could be hard or easy, and in general they get harder toward the "end" of the trellis.

6. Trigger Rewind - as a group you can decide to trigger a Rewind on purpose - rewind just 1 step (everyone moves left 1 space on the trellis) and the Instability marker is moved forward once. This may be necessary to get to a decision point otherwise unreachable.

That's it, then you go to the next round. Hand limit was 5 cards, and each time the Instability marker reached the end it caused a Rewind, the first rewinding just 1 space, the next 2 spaces, then 3... etc.

The game was kinda fun, and showed some potential, but as we discussed various mechanisms for the different aspects it just seemed more and more like Solitaire by Committee. Maybe that's OK, a lot of the cooperative ("Collaborative?") games out there right now (maybe all) are Solitaire by Committee, and people like them just fine. I am not out to make a SbC coop game, but I concede that this may turn into that.

More importantly, I noticed that moving your player pawn around on an abstract web of decision points was really lame. A better implementation (and pretty much the original idea for the game) would have the scientists (players) running around a board which depicts a town with the mad scientist's lair off to one side, and various locations where you could pick up items and take actions. The Trellis could be represented more like the original model, a stack of event cards which you would, at the beginning of your turn, flip and address... most would allow you to make a choice - perhaps as to what combination of cards you can play to the common pool... either (Red + Blue) or (Green + Yellow) for example. Some of those cards would be major events, and when those come up they have some requirements that must be met by cards in the pool. If the requirements are met, those cards are removed and the benefit of the event is earned. If not, then the benefit is not met (there may be a penalty). In the case of failure, the players may have another chance later, after a rewind.

In this version I think there would be some tools, and a number of Tool tiles (maybe 3 for he first level, 4 for the next, and 5 for the last?) would be placed face down in the Mad Scientist's Lab. In order to repair the Instability, the players would need to send someone to the Lab to 'throw the switch' or whatever, and when that happens either they have the right tools with them at the time (in which case Hurray! the Instability is partially fixed! things get a little better!), or they don't, in which case they make it worse! Maybe any tiles matching tools you have are removed (as are the tools), and any unmatched tiles make the Instability worse (increase the intensity of a rewind).

I think the benefit of passing challenges in the event deck would be revealing Tool tiles at the Lab, so that you know what you need to get. Players would probably have some number of actions points, and they would use them to move around the town and activate the buildings there in order to collect tools, draw cards, peek at the top of the Event deck, or whatever. Maybe even trigger little rewinds (making the instability worse) in order to re-do a challenge just failed.

That might be my next attempt at this game. Not sure how it will play out.

On adding a money auction

Since I'm dropping the geographical portion from what was Rodeo Drive - a fairly interactive part of the game - I think it may turn out to be important to have an additional interactive mechanism in the game.

Perhaps this money auction can serve that purpose.

Regarding format, I was considering either a Goa style once-around auction, or a Container style blind bid. Each of those formats have up-sides and down sides, and I was leaning toward the Goa style auction. The thing I like least about that auction is the turn order for bidding. Karlo in BGDF chat recommended changing up the turn order such that the closer you were in the bluff auction to guessing the right number, the later in the turn order you get to bid in the money auction. In a once around auction it's an advantage to bid later in the turn order. I wasn't sure how this would work considering that some players would effectively be tied for closest (players who have not bid for example, or a player who overbid by 2 and a player who underbid by 2). Karlo's suggestion was to have all tied players bid simultaneously (Container-style), followed by the next player(s) in turn order.

I think that would work well for the nonparticipants (players who didn't end up with a bid marker on the Auction Track in question), and perhaps for the overbidders, with only the underbidders getting unique turn order for bidding in the money auction.

So that's where I'm at right now in my thinking for this game - adding a money auction with approximately that format. I think this could do a number of good things for the game.

In other news, I had pondered disallowing track-jumping when you've been outbid in the bluff auction. However I think I've realized that that would effectively ruin a lot of the mechanism, and would in general be dumb.

A Stitch in Time Saves Nine

I was thinking about the Museum of Time (?) game idea I posted the other day, and thought it might be interesting to add another layer of auctions to the game. Suppose each player starts with some amount of money, and money counts as Victory Points at the end of the game.*

When resolving the Liar's Auction and receiving the Artifacts, players could have a choice - instead of simply keeping the artifact, there could be a quick auction where each player bids money to buy the artifact. This could be done 3 different ways:

- Player decides to Keep or Auction the item, if Auction is chosen then they must take (or maybe pay) the highest bid

- Player automatically auctions off the item, and chooses either to take the highest bid, or simply keep the item (possibly must pay the high bid to the bank, as in Goa)

- Players blind bid simultaneously for the artifact, and the auctioneer either accepts the high bid (or maybe anyone's bid) or else keeps the artifact (maybe having to pay the bank something).

The first idea there might go hand in hand with either of the other two. The main purpose of this is twofold:

1.) A player could go for an Artifact not because they want it for their set, but because it will fetch a decent price from one or more of the other players.

2.) A player who did poorly at the Liar's Dice portion of the game could still get an Artifact they want, at least a couple of times during the game, by paying money for it.

Another interesting thing about this idea is that a player's Museum could be limited to maybe 3 different categories of Artifacts, while there are 5 different categories in the game (the 6th being Futuristic Technologies, or a wild or something). Therefore a player winning a Liar's Auction for an item they cannot place in their Museum would be forced to auction it off. This could potentially foster competition for items, as you might want to get an item that is valuable for another player even if it's not valuable for you, so that at least when they buy it from you you get some money from them.

* In fact, there could be Scoring Rounds during the game wherein players show their current exhibits, earning some money. Each artifact could have an income value, so you just add up the value of your collections, and each collection could get a bonus if you have some condition met (3+ of the same type of item, or the same color of item, or whatever). This reminds me of JC Lawrence's Corner Lot scoring a little bit, as well as Cow Tipping's scoring in a way.

Another thought I've been pondering for this game is whether or not a player should be able to switch which Artifact they're 'bidding' on when they are outbid. One of the fundamental parts of the mechanism is that you can bluff another player into bidding too high, and thus far I've considered that to be a viable tactic - you bid on a color you don't really care about in order to bluff someone into a bid you think is too high, then you move your bid to another color which you do care about - your opponent's bid marker is trapped in an overbid on that first track. I wonder if it might be better to have to commit to a color when yu place a bid. You still want to bluff people into overbidding, but doing so doesn't let you get something else for 'free' - if you want the item you have to 'bid' right, and if you try and bluff someone into overbidding you have to be a little careful or at least realize you might be overbidding as well. I don't know if that really counts as a bluff anymore.

Just some thoughts to chew on. If you have any thoughts feel free to post them!

Museum of Unnatural history?

I need a name for this game...

Premise:
With the advent of Time Travel, museum curators have procured prototype time machines, and will use them to go back in time and "save" precious cultural artifacts that - until now - have been lost to history (damaged, destroyed, or lost forever). But it's very important not to cause a paradox, or let people know the item still exists - so only the player who arrives closest to the time the item is thought to have disappeared will be able to take it!

Furthermore, as time travel becomes more widespread, rumors of future technology surface, and players can attempt to go forward in time and procure them for their own use (only the player that arrives first, after the technology is invented, will get it).

Players are Curators collecting items for their Exhibits. Each Exhibit will be worth points depending on how many Artifacts it contains. Collecting artifacts from one culture will help to find more artifacts from the same culture, however 3 different Exhibits is more impressive than 1 really big Exhibit, so specializing in just 1 culture's artifacts may not be the best way to go.

Mechanics:
Each round 5 different artifacts from 5 different cultures and 1 futuristic technology will be revealed - information about these items has surfaced, and players will have to calibrate their time machines to attempt to collect them.

Each player will roll a number of Color Dice, this represents research being done. the colors rolled represent information about the matching colored culture/artifact. Each player has some information but nobody has all of it. Using the information they have, and judging their opponents based on their actions, players calibrate their time machines by iteratively 'bidding' on how far back in time to send each of their Explorers (players will have 4/3/2/2 explorers an a 2/3/4/5 player game), and for which artifact. When all players are satisfied, each artifact is retrieved by the player who chose the closest without going over (er, in this case maybe "without going under"). The Futuristic Technology is collected by the player who goes forward in time the least without going over. The 'calibrating' phase works like this:

When it's your turn, you place an Explorer token on one of the Time tracks associated with one of the artifacts. You can only place 1 explorer on each track. Once all of your explorers are on tracks, your turn consists of Passing (if your explorers are furthest along all of the tracks, or you are happy with how far back you are sending them), or re-placing an Explorer who has been 'outbid' (another explorer has been placed higher on the same track - indicating that he'll be closer to the correct time, unless he doesn't go back far enough to 'save' the artifact).

Once everybody is happy with their explorer placement, the artifact retrieval is resolved by revealing all dice. For each artifact, the player who's explorer is on the space closest to the space corresponding to the correct number of dice of that color without going over collects the artifact.

When determining the number of dice, it's possible that a player might have a special ability which allows him to count an additional die - that die only counts for that player, other players compare their explorer placement with the actual number of dice. This can create a tie, and in the case of a tie, the player without the 'bonus' (or with fewer bonuses) wins the tie and collects the item.

Each round, or when receiving certain Artifacts, each player is given an additional color die to roll, representing more information becoming available as time travel becomes more widespread.

In the end, each Exhibit will be worth some number of points depending on the artifacts that are in it. Perhaps to score an Exhibit at all you need to collect at least 3 artifacts of that type, and each additional artifact is worth less and less. That way just 1 of each type isn't enough to score really well, but all of 1 type isn't as good as 3 each of several types.

Liar's Auction revisited

About 2 years ago I had an idea to build a bigger game out of the mechanic that is Liar's Dice. I discussed it with a friend, and we worked on a game using a multiple Liar's Dice Auction that I came up with... he didn't want me to discuss the game, so I didn't. I kept a blog post describing the early version of the game unpublished so as not to break his confidence or anything...

Well, that friend disappeared - left town and didn't reply to emails or phone calls. He eventually moved back to town, but still didn't contact me or return calls - the last I spoke to him he sounded disappointed that the Liar's Dice auction game (as well as another game we were working on together) couldn't be finished. I replied that I'm still here, and still interested in working on them, but that hasn't promoted any further contact.

So while I liked the direction that game was going, I have decided to take my Liar's Dice auction mechanism and do something else with it. I don't feel this is a moral no-no because it was my idea, and I'm not re-using game I was collaborating with that guy on - just the main mechanism I'd come up with for it.

In discussing a different possible theme for this mechanism in BGDF chat, someone suggested time travel. Frankly, the idea of getting to a location (in time) after an incident occurs but before anybody else is the closest thematic match I have heard of for the Liar's Dice mechanism, which is basically a "guess closest to the right number without going over" thing. It isn't as perfectly clean when going back in time, but I think it's close enough to say that you don't want to disrupt things and cause paradoxes, so only the player going back to a point just before an item is rumored to have disappeared (destroyed, stolen, damaged, lost) is the player that gets to take it... that way the general public might not notice any difference.

What I'm getting at here - and I bet it's not clear - is that players will be curators of futuristic museums. Time travel has just been discovered, and as a result you have the unique opportunity to exhibit some of the world's lost treasures for the first time in your museum! Each round information will surface on 6 different artifacts from the past, each of which was thought damaged, destroyed, or lost forever... doing some research to find out exactly where and when these items disappeared, players will calibrate their time machines and send explorers to grab the items before they get lost or destroyed. It's imperative not to change history, so only the player who gets closest to the time at which history dictates the item goes missing is allowed to take the item. If you don't go back far enough, the item will already be gone, and if you go back too far and take the item, history will change (and you can't risk that!)

Maybe better is this blurb:

With the advent of Time Travel, museum curators have procured prototype time machines, and will use them to go back in time and "save" precious cultural artifacts that - until now - have been lost to history (damaged, destroyed, or lost forever). But it's very important not to cause a paradox, or let people know the item still exists - so only the player who arrives closest to the time the item is thought to have disappeared will be able to take it!

Furthermore, as time travel becomes more widespread, rumors of future technology surface, and players can attempt to go forward in time and procure them for their own use (only the player that arrives first, after the point it's invented, will get it).

The game will be about set collection then. Your museum will have maybe 5 Exhibits, and you need to collect items to put in the exhibits. Maybe for example Green indicates ancient Mayan civilization... so you collect Green artifacts (from the Green auction) and will score for them. One main scoring thought I had before (and would like to continue to use) is that winning one auction makes you better at winning that auction again, but winning the same auction over and over is less and less lucrative. For example, your 1st/2nd/3rd Mayan artifact might be worth 5/4/3 victory points. Therefore getting three different artifacts is worth more than getting three of the same artifact. However, having a Mayan artifact may give you more information about the Mayan culture, and help you to correctly calibrate your time machine when going after other Mayan artifacts (having a green item allows you to count 1 additional Green die when resolving an auction, usable only by you).

I like the dichotomy of getting better at winning the same auction again but having incentive to try and win a different auction.

I mentioned "technologies" from the future - those would be not artifacts that score points, but rather items that give you bonus abilities, like the ability to re-roll some dice before the bidding phase of the auction, or the ability to swap items with an opponent or something.

So now I just need to rethink some of the abilities that could be needed in this game, and maybe come up with some cultures such as the Mayans to draw from... doesn't have to be extremely historically accurate - after all, each item in the game is one that is not supposed to exist, so I can make them all up!

Maybe 5 cultures, and 1 color always representing a futuristic technology - thus 5 exhibits per player. I'm liking this theme more and more!

Time Travel and Board games

I've discussed before how time travel is hard, and though there have been several attempts at games based on it, the closest I've seen to one that works really well is Khronos. Khronos is a pretty interesting game, but it's really hard and somewhat tedious to see the implications of your actions.

I had never really planned on trying to design a game about time travel, at least not until I got some kind of good idea for it. A recent (February) Game Design Showdown was about going back in time, and that got me thinking about the subject a little bit. What I came up with was a cooperative game (another genre I haven't really worked on much) idea:

Like so many science experiments, this one went horribly wrong. In a bid for the Nobel Prize, a brilliant but eccentric physicist got a bit overzealous with a new discovery, and inadvertently created a tear in the space-time continuum. This tear is unstable, and in time would grow and eventually unravel space-time altogether - and that would be bad for everyone.

It's up to a team of scientists to find a way to fix space-time before the instability grows too much and the world turns inside out. The only problem is, the tear in space-time has begun to cause 'Rewinds' - instances in which time literally rewinds and the scientists are pushed back to a previous point in their endeavor.

Players work together to navigate a tree of decisions, each leading to 1 of 2 paths. At the end of each branch of the tree is a Result card, some with a favorable result - the scientists fix space-time and save the day... and some less favorable - game over! with each turn there's a chance that the instability of space-time triggers a Rewind, pushing players back some number of decision points. The worse the tear gets, the bigger the Rewind. If time rewinds past the beginning of the game, then that's all she wrote!

The main mechanism of this game was to be that players must make choices with little or no information at first, then as they move on more information becomes available. Then when a Rewind occurs, players can use the newer information in order to re-do a prior choice they made. On a players turn they first roll some dice, and then they can do one of several things - each option might be restricted in some way by the die roll. In addition, whenever the roll totals 7 (or perhaps is over some threshold), a Rewind occurs and players are pushed back along the decision tree some number of spaces. An Instability track indicates how far back the Rewind takes the team, and after the Rewind, the Instability increases (the next Rewind will be bigger).

Today I put a little thought into some details - I envision a deck of 'choice cards' which would be shuffled and dealt out in a triangular 'trellis' pattern. The last (8th) row of the trellis would be made up of Result cards - maybe 5 bad ("game over, you lose") and 3 good ("WIN!"). Maybe 1 of the good cards is extra good, so players can try to find that particular result as opposed to just any of the 3 good result cards for a harder game.

Each decision point has 2 possible outcomes, each leading to one of the decision points in the next row. The point of the game is to navigate through these decision points to one of the Result cards in the 8th row - but of course you want it to be one of the winning Result cards.

Possible actions on your turn would include:

- Peek at some of the Result cards - the closer you are to the 8th row the fewer you look at, narrowing it down. After peeking at them you shuffle them and replace them. Thus if you do it in the beginning, you see that indeed 3 of the 8 cards are 'winners' and 5 are not. If you do it from the third row you look at 6 adjacent result cards... and from the 6th row you look at just 3. They have to be the three you could still reach without rewinding - so if they all are losers then you'll want to rewind and try another path.

- Get resources - based on the die roll maybe you collect certain colored cards which will be needed to progress to the next row.

- Advance - pay the listed cost in cards in order to advance to the next Decision Point (next row). Depending on which of the 2 paths you wish to take you might need a different combination of cards to pay.

- Force Rewind - Players can trigger a rewind, backing up time and moving the group to an earlier decision point - but this of course makes the Instability grow - too much and space-time will unravel.

- Repair Instability - There should be some way (at some times) to repair the instability somewhat, moving the track back, effectively lengthening the game - giving players more time to successfully finish before the space-time continuum unravels.
This could be based in part on arriving at certain cards - the end card could repair the Instability a certain number of units, so maybe you actually have to hit more than one of them. And some cards along the way might do that too. This would also add weight to an action that allows players to look at the 2 upcoming Decision Points, to help decide which direction they want to go: "This one has a Repair icon on it, let's collect the stuff we need to go this way!" Maybe some Decision Points are worse and they cause an instability bump when they're revealed. The Peek action mentioned above could also be used in the midgame, not just to look at the Result cards but any upcoming Decision Points. Maybe look at 1 of the possible Decision Point cards and put it back, or all of the possible Decision Points in a column and then shuffle them.

further thoughts on this will be forthcoming... eventually.